There have been plenty of UFO cases and reports from the skies above our heads, but this seems to be far from the end of such unearthly phenomena. One are of supposed alien phenomena that doesn’t seem to get as much attention is that of strange things beneath the waters of out world. Known as USOs, meaning “Unidentified Submerged Objects,” or also “Unidentified Submersible Objects,” these are those fleetingly glimpsed “underwater UFOs” which are seen roaming about and entering and exiting oceans or lakes to create just as much awe and wonder as their airborne brethren. Here we will look at a selection or truly strange cases of unidentified submarine craft zipping about and inspiring wonder and debate.

Some earlier reports of USOs were mentioned in the book Unexplained!, by Jerome Clark, the earliest coming from all the way back in 1924, before the idea of UFOs was even really a thing. On July 1 of that year, pilot D.P. Lott and a photographer by the name of R.A. Smith were flying a small aircraft over the Hudson River, New York, when they saw below them two enormous mysterious objects in the water, each one estimated as being around 250 feet in length and travelling parallel to each other through the waves. The objects were described as being cylindrical in shape and with pointed ends, both leaving an “arrow-shaped wake” in their paths as they lumbered through. After some period of observation, the two massive objects submerged out of sight. It would later turn out that the Navy had no submarines scheduled to be in the area, and even if they did, these things were much larger than any known submarine of the era. The sighting remains unexplained.

In 1945 we have the case of the U.S. Army transport Delanof, which was off the coast of Alaska when an immense round object about 200 feet in diameter allegedly ominously emerged from the sea to loom over the water. It then purportedly turned to face the ship, then circled silently around them a few times as if examining them, before flying off out of sight. In 1947, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl was on his vessel in the South Pacific, capturing dolphins somewhere between South America and the Polynesian islands, and he and his crew saw “the shine of phosphorescent eyes drifting on the surface” several nights in a row. No one could figure it out, then one night, things would get stranger, of which he would say:

On one single occasion, we saw the sea boil and bubble while something like a big wheel came up and rotated in the air, while of our dolphins tried to escape by hurling themselves desperately through space.

The object then hovered a while before disappearing into the murky sea once again. In 1954 there is a report from the crew of the Dutch ship the Groote Beer, who observed a “flat, moon-shaped object” rise from beneath the grey waves near Long Island, New York. Captain Jan P. Boshoff would describe it as being gray, metallic, and having a ring of lights along its edge. It then flew off out of sight. Curiously, at around the same time, a strange sight was allegedly seen by the Honduran freighter Aliki P., which reported it as a “ball of fire moving in and out of the water without being extinguished, trailing white smoke and moving in erratic course. It is unknown if this could have been the same object witnessed by the Groote Beer.

The following year, in 1955, a couple by the name of the Bordes were out rowing at the Titicus Reservoir in Westchester County, New York, at around 1:30 a.m. when a rose-colored, luminous sphere rose from the water just a few feet from their boat and floated off towards shore, after which it rose sharply and then disappeared down into the water with a loud splash. It was eerie enough that the couple decided to call it a night and head back to shore. As they rowed along, eyes glued to the placid surface of the lake, they saw around 200 yards away two “parallel lights, wavy in shape but rigid, thirty feet in length” moving under the surface. Above these shapes was a “round light of lesser brilliance,” which was over the water but not hovering, rather seemingly attached to a larger body beneath, which could be seen as a “dim grey shape against the blackness.” When the couple reached the shore, they saw that the things was still out there, but when they returned some time later it was gone. They would insist it was not another boat out there with them.

From the 1960s we have a strange case that was mentioned in the book Invisible Residents, by Ivan Sanderson. The incident allegedly happened in 1963 off the coast of Puerto Rico, where the U.S. Navy was at the time conducting an anti-submarine warfare exercise. The command ship at the time was the anti-submarine warfare carrier USS Wasp, along with a fleet of five smaller vessels, mostly destroyers, and an unknown number of submarines below. It began when one of the sonar stations on one of the destroyers noticed that one of the submarines had broken formation and appeared to be pursuing a smaller, fast-moving unidentified object. This smaller object was reported as moving in excess of 150 knots, and would apparently lurk about the area for several days, zipping about underwater and tracked by both Naval ships and anti-submarine warfare patrol aircraft. The mysterious object was reported as doing maneuvers and travelling at speeds far beyond any submarine technology, as well as doing sudden, rapid dives to depths of up to 27,000 feet. Apparently visual confirmation was never made, so it is difficult to tell what this thing could have been.

In August of 1965 we have the case of the Soviet steamship Raduga, which was doing maneuver in the Red Sea when they had a rather bizarre encounter. It was reported that the crew observed a “fiery sphere” estimated as 60 meters in diameter spectacularly shoot out from underwater to hover over the waves for a time. It was noted that its exit from the water had caused a huge pillar of water to erupt forth with it. After a few minutes of hovering there motionlessly, the craft then smashed down into the water, leaving turbulence and roiling waves. Also in the 1960s was a report from a Marine at Guantanamo Bay, who would claim that personnel at the base would routinely see strange lights both in the sky and underwater, sometimes measuring up to 100 feet in length, but that they were always told not to discuss it. Years later, he would say of his experiences:

When I stood guard duty on the south side of the base, I witnessed on many, many nights UFOs landing and taking off out of the ocean. There were large blue lights moving around after their landing in the ocean and then slowly dimming down as they obviously descended deeper.

Yet another case from the files of the National UFO Recording Center (NUFORC) supposedly happened in 1964 at Laguna Beach, California. The witness claims to have gone to take a walk on the beach when he had a very weird experience. He explains what happened:

A long wooden stair case led down the cliffs to the beach and the waves appeared to be in the cliffs’ shadow from Highway 1 headlights. I saw a series of lights glowing from behind the waves about 5 feet apart and 8  inches in diameter. It/they gave the appearance of portholes on the side of a submersible. I have no explanation. When they interviewed a CA lighthouse keeper on the radio (his station was becoming automated – and you had to walk through a tunnel to reach it) and asked him if in all of his years of watching the surf he had seen anything strange – he reported seeing the same thing — with no idea what it could be.

From the 1970s there was an account given by an Admiral V.A. Domislovsky, chief of the Pacific Fleet’s Intelligence Department of the Soviet Navy. He would report that he had witnessed a gigantic cylindrical object around 800-900 meters long, which hovered over the water and emitted swarms of smaller flying objects “like bees from a beehive.” These smaller objects were then claimed to have shot down into the eater to disappear for a time, before flying back out and back into the larger “mothership.” This happened several times, after which the colossal ship loaded up all of the smaller craft and flew off at terrific speed.

In more recent decades there have been various other reports of USOs as well. From the files of NUFORC is one from February of 2007, reported by a witness who says that at the time she had been aboard a cruise ship “Damn Princess,” heading back to San Francisco from a cruise of the Mexican Riviera. As they passed Half Moon Bay, she claims to have had a very otherworldly experience, of which she says:

I was coughing up a storm at ~2 A.M., and my husband went to find a hot lemonade. I was awake anyway, so I pulled back the curtains and stood in the window to watch the ship’s churning water – mesmerizing! After about 5 minutes, three softly glowing objects came into view – three uniform, nearly spherical objects, evenly spaced in a line parallel to the ship’s hull and hovering just above the water surface. Based on the appearance of dolphins from the window, and of people seen standing on piers, I’d say that these spheres were somewhat larger – maybe 12-15’ high. Perfectly smooth, and with a pale bluish-white glow. They appeared to stay in one place while the ship moved past them. They were hovering, but didn’t disturb the water below them. Just as they went out of my sight, the left one (toward the bow) splashed down into the water and disappeared.

Of course, I hadn’t thought to tear myself away from the window to get the cell phone or camera (both in the safe, and of doubtful use through a window at night…). And, of course, three more glowing spheres, hovering in a straight line along the edge of the wake, came past the window 2 minutes later! 4-5 minutes after that, two more spheres were seen, but farther away from the ship. The first and second groups had been located just where the ship’s wake or foam line ends. The last group was about twice as far away. The “bow-ward” of these last two also dropped down into the water and disappeared. I was still standing at the window, in amazement, when my husband came back with lemon tea. I told him about the spheres, and we watched for a while, but no more sightings.

Another report from NUFORC happened as recently as 2017. In March of that year, a group of unnamed witnesses aboard an oil rig offshore supply ship (OSV) in the Gulf of Mexico, about 80 miles southeast of New Orleans, when they saw something very bizarre indeed. They claim that an immense, oval-shaped object estimated as being more than five times bigger than the 240-foot ship they were on rose up out of the ocean, yet oddly appeared to not be wet. The massive object was completely silent, and rose to hover around 30 feet over the waves before rapidly ascending out of sight at a 30-degree angle.

That very same year we have a report from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) which comes from Green Bay, a sub-basin of Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the Fox River near Little Suamico in Wisconsin. The unnamed witness claims that on November 18, 2017, he was at the lake when he observed a triangular-shaped UFO measuring around 100 to 150 feet in diameter emerge from the water. Susan Birttnen, of Wisconsin MUFON, would say of the report:

He reports they witnessed a triangular-shaped object fly out of the water of Green Bay, traveling at approximately 35 knots. It was so close that they could hear a muffled jet sound. As it came out of the water it turned on its side as it traveled west and gained elevation. The color was dark and it had blue flashing lights. The elevation was at 500 feet and the distance was less than 1,000 feet. The side of the triangle was between 100 to 150 feet. Based on the evidence and the data provided by the witness, I conclude that this case is in the unknown category.

What was this thing? Who knows? Lastly, we have our most recent report yet, logged in 2021 from the skies over Leeward, Oahu, in Hawaii. In January of that year, numerous witnesses began calling 911 reporting seeing a glowing blue oblong mass and a smaller white light darting about the sky, before the blue one went crashing into the water below. One witness only known as Moriah would tell Hawaii News Now of her own sighting of the spectacle playing out in the sky:

I look up and then I was like oh s***! I started calling my husband and them because they were all in the garage. I was like hey. Come look up there. See if you see what I see. They all said yea! I don’t know what it was. This one was going so fast.  It went land in the water. Whatever it is. We called 911. For have like one cop or somebody for come out and come check em out. My husband went look up and he seen the white one coming. The white one was smaller. Was coming in the same direction as the blue one.

After the blue one had gone into the sea, the smaller white one then apparently shot off over the mountain to disappear. Numerous people in the area reported the same thing to police, with several people even taking video footage of it all. In the meantime, officials from the Federal Aviation Administration insisted that there had been no aircraft incident or accident in the area of the sightings, and no reports of a missing airplane. All of these reports leave us with some rather perplexing mysteries. What is there, if anything, roaming about under the waves of out seas and lakes? What do they want and why are they hiding beneath the waves? There is no way to know the answers, but reports of USOs keep coming in, and it is a curious subspecies of UFO report that perhaps deserves more attention than it has received.

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Of all of the types of evidence that have been put forward over the years for UFOs, certainly the most sought after is physical proof, something we can see and touch. It is a type of evidence that has remained frustratingly elusive over the decades, and considering the thousands of UFO sightings on record and the numerous reports of actual UFO crashes, one might think it was only a matter of time before such evidence came to light, but this has not proven to be the case. Any such alleged evidence is always whisked away by the military or covered up, leaving us with only stories. Yet, on occasion, we get a story of a piece of UFO or something of the sort, and one of these is the tale of a man who claimed to have retrieved a mysterious artifact dropped from an alien craft over the desert.

One evening in 1985, a man named Bob White was driving with a friend on their way from Denver to Las Vegas. At the time, White was asleep and his friend at the wheel, watching the hypnotic lane lines flicker by as they meandered through the remote wasteland between Grand Junction, Colorado and the Utah border. Here was a place in which there was not another soul for miles around, a moonscape of rocky desert that expanded out past the illumination of the headlights in a vast expanse of nothingness, and it would have been a rather dull drive until a weird series of events began to play out that made the evening a bit more exciting.

Bob White

At around 2:30 a.m., White was jolted awake by his friend. Wiping the sleepiness from his eyes and watching the nighttime desert streak by outside, he at first couldn’t figure out why his friend had woken him. It wasn’t his turn to be at the wheel and nothing at first seemed out of place, the car smoothly rolling along, but his friend was in a state of agitation. When White asked what was going on, his companion frantically pointed off towards the horizon, and it was then that he could see a strange light off in the distance, which did not look like an airplane. The light steadily grew in size and brightness until it was blinding, turning the desert night into day, and White would say of what happened:

The light was about the size of a full harvest moon. As we got closer, it grew larger. When we were a few hundred yards from it, I turned off the ignition and we coasted up close to it. It was huge, the size of a very big barn. I got out of the car for a better look. For some unknown reason, Jan turned on the headlights, and this light went up in the sky as fast as my eyes could follow it. What I saw, was not of this Earth. Then I saw another small light, bright orange with a tinge of yellow, white, and blue falling from it.

After this, the larger object rose into the air rapidly, joined with an even larger object, a sort of “mother ship,” and the whole of it shot off into the night, leaving the two frightened men there alone in the dark desert once again to try and process what they had just seen. Overcome with curiosity, White started hiking off through the scrub through the wilderness towards where he estimated the smaller object had fallen, making his way up an incline to find a groove in the ground, which he estimates as having been around 18 inches deep and 9 inches wide. Within this groove was a glowing object, about 7-1/2 inches long and shaped like a teardrop, still too hot to get anywhere near and apparently made of some kind of metal. White waited until it had cooled down enough to touch, and then brought it back to the car, stashing it into the trunk.

White, who claims to have never believed in UFOs before this incident, was baffled as to what the object could possibly be, but did not know who to turn to for help or what to do with it. He kept it locked in a safe deposit box to keep it safe, and in the meantime travelled about trying to raise interest in his discovery, travelling to conferences and trying to get the object tested. He even opened his Museum of the Unexplained, which would hold the object high as its main attraction. In 1996, a small sample of the object was finally tested by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which didn’t come to any firm conclusions, but did have this to say:

The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane. We didn’t find any evidence that it was extraterrestrial. Now you can make the argument that we didn’t spend $1 million and look at every conceivable option. We didn’t cover every base.

A second laboratory came to a similar conclusion, deflating hoped that this was an alien device or piece of spaceship. Undeterred and convinced of the object’s otherworldly nature, White decided to keep trying, sending in samples to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico Tech, and at the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, for more thorough analyses. One of White’s partners, a Dr. Robert Gibbons, a former scientist with NASA, would say of the results of these further tests:

We recently came across scientific data that linked Bob’s object with the planet Mars. Isotope abundance ratio tests were performed on Bob’s object in May, 1999 in La Jolla, CA and the numbers are virtually the same as obtained from Martian meteorite samples. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the QUE 94201 meteorite found in Antarctica in 1994 was 0.701. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for Bob’s object was 0.712. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the Shergotty meteorite found India in 1865 was 0.723. Bob’s object is right in the middle of two proven Martian meteorites!

Bob White and his mysterious artifact

So, what does this all mean? Well, the most rational explanation is that this is exactly what the object is: a meteorite. This could also explain the strange sighting the two men had had to some degree, although it doesn’t explain the presence of the massive UFO they had seen or the “mothership” it attached to before speeding off into the night. Other ideas are that they saw debris from a satellite falling, or some naturally occurring celestial phenomenon, and that the weird object he found was completely unrelated. Then there is the possibility that this is all just a hoax. All of these possibilities White strongly denied. He never tried to get rich off of his findings, and whatever he did find out there in the desert, he certainly seemed to have at least truly believe it was real, once saying of his crusade to get the object recognized:

This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’m 73 years old. I don’t have much longer. What I’d like to see before I’m gone is the national media get their heads out of the sand. I’d like to see the national media and everybody else realize that what I have is real. I don’t know what I have to do to prove this is the truth. You can’t make this stuff up.

He would continue to adamantly stick to his story and defend his strange discovery all the way up to his death in 2009, but the object would stay locked away in his museum, where it remains to this day. What exactly did he find out there in the desert on that fateful night? Is this a piece of meteorite, space debris, just a weird-looking rock, a hoax, or something else? As of yet, there is no proof that the object is anything more mysterious than a rock or meteorite, but it is still a pretty odd story all the same, and managed to get a lot of attention in its time as a piece of possible physical evidence from a UFO.

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What others have to say about the Bob White object

I recently wrote a few articles on how, during the Cold War, the Russians tried to manipulate U.S. intelligence agencies by using the UFO phenomenon. But, what about the U.K.? Has it been manipulated in strange, similar ways by the Russians? The answer is: Yes. There’s no doubt about it. Welcome to the Serpo mystery. If you don’t know about Serpo, well, it goes like this: in May 1987 a woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon – an employee of the CIA who wrote sci-fi under the alias of James Tiptree – took her life. Her husband’s life, too. Sheldon is believed to have created a faked UFO document – to freak out the Russians – in the 1960s called the Serpo document. It tells a story that mirrors certain portions of the 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Specifically, the final stages of the movie in which Richard Dreyfuss’ character of Roy Neary is taken away by aliens. To understand how and why the Brits – alongside their American counterparts – secretly decided to make use of the UFO phenomenon in the late 1960s, and for reasons relative to counterintelligence, disinformation programs, and Russian destabilization, we have to begin with a sensational saga that surfaced in November 2005. That was when a source using the term “Anonymous” came out of the shadows and told an incredible story. Some said it was too incredible to be true. It just might have been exactly that.

Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977).

It’s a story surrounding what became known within Ufology as “The Serpo Documents.” As for “Anonymous, he or she was said to have been a government insider with a wealth of information on some of the biggest UFO-themed secrets of all time. Here’s what “Anonymous” shared with the UFO research community on the Serpo controversy: “I am a retired employee of the U.S. Government. I won’t go into any great details about my past, but I was involved in a special program. As for Roswell, it occurred, but not like the story books tell. There were two crash sites: one southwest of Corona, New Mexico and the second site at Pelona Peak, south of Datil, New Mexico. The crash involved two extraterrestrial aircraft. The Corona site was found a day later by an archaeological team. This team reported the crash site to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s department. A deputy arrived the next day and summoned a state police officer. One live entity was found hiding behind a rock. The entity was given water but declined food. The entity was later transferred to Los Alamos. The information eventually went to Roswell Army Air Field. The site was examined and all evidence was removed. The bodies were taken to Los Alamos National Laboratory because they had a freezing system that allowed the bodies to remain frozen for research. The craft was taken to Roswell and then onto Wright Field, Ohio.”

The source continued: “The second site was not discovered until August 1949 by two ranchers. They reported their findings several days later to the sheriff of Catron County, New Mexico. Because of the remote location, it took the sheriff several days to make his way to the crash site. Once at the site, the sheriff took photographs and then drove back to Datil. Sandia Army Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico was then notified. A recovery team from Sandia took custody of all evidence, including six bodies. The bodies were taken to Sandia Base, but later transferred to Los Alamos. The live entity established communications with us and provided us with a location of his home planet. The entity remained alive until 1952, when he died. But before his death, he provided us with a full explanation of the items found inside the two crafts. One item was a communication device. The entity was allowed to make contact with his planet.” From thereon, the story expanded significantly: supposedly a number of American astronauts were sent to the planet of the aliens, no less.”

The highly talkative English informant, who worked at the U.K. Ministry of Defense, said the following of the statement from “Anonymous”: “Interesting reading. However, these are NOT real events that are being described here, although the document they come from IS REAL. I saw this information in 1969 or ’70 in Whitehall [London]. Originally it was a CIA document authored by a lady named Alice Bradley Sheldon. Its main purpose, if you will pardon the phrase, was to ‘scare the crap out of the Soviets’ in response to them scaring the crap out of us. In the ’60s, during the warmer part of the Cold War, the KGB successfully led the U.S. Government to believe that a number of nuclear devices had been concealed in disused mines and caves close to four (4) large American cities. These bombs could be detonated by sleeper agents at any time Moscow wished. It was not completely disproved that this was fake until 1980.”

There’s this, too, from the source: “The ‘Project SERPO’ report was part of the CIA’s riposte to this and an attempt to trump the Soviets. Its aim was to make them believe that we had acquired lethal extraterrestrial energy devices and that we had a cozy friendship with these all-powerful EBENs [EBEN is allegedly a classified term used by American Intelligence to describe aliens. It is said to derive from the term ‘Extraterrestrial Biological Entity’] who would be very unhappy if Moscow attempted to harm the United States in any way. To a degree I believe this effort was effective to begin with. However, it came unstuck when the CIA tried to overreach the information by ADDING PHOTOGRAPHS and also trying to spook allies such as ourselves who were better equipped to analyze the information and bugged to the hilt by the KGB. Why this information is being released again now I do not know. Possibly in the past the DIA could have BEEN FOOLED BY THE CIA into believing that ‘Project SERPO’was a real event and the ANONYMOUS source may genuinely want to release this information. Alternatively the DIA may have got it direct from the KGB most likely with a few choice modifications added by them.”

To me, all of this sounds entirely plausible. After all, what’s more likely, that decades ago aliens from their world came to our planet (and vice-versa) or that the whole thing was nothing but a made-up yarn to mess with the minds of Russian Intelligence? People in Ufology who thrive on the Serpo story may not like to hear my views on all of this, but the fact is that, in this story, the simplest scenario is probably the correct one. And, maybe one day, we’ll know more about how and why the U.K. Ministry of Defense were caught up in all of this.

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Yes, I know: that’s a very controversial question to pose. But, sometimes, things are stranger than they seem to be – as you’ll see now. For the most part, people in Ufology take the view that the Contactees of the 1950s were either telling the truth of their experiences, or that they were hoaxing everything. But, what if there was a far more controversial scenario: namely, that of a Russian connection? For those who may not know, the Space Brothers were extremely-human-looking beings and they wore their hair long: both the men and the women. And, they surfaced in the early 1950s – predominantly on the West Coast of the United States. They were somewhat bullying in their demands that we, the Human Race, change our approach to life. In other words, they wanted us to get rid of our “atomic bombs,” as they were known back then. And, also, that we should all join together as one. They claimed to have come from extremely unlikely places, such as Venus, Mars and Saturn. Some of the most famous Contactees – those that had face-to-face encounters – included Truman Bethurum, Dana Howard, George Adamski, Dan Fry, Orfeo Angelucci, George Van Tassel, and George Hunt Williamson. Most of them wrote a book or two about their experiences, and just about all of them went on the lecture circuit – and for years, no less. The Space Brothers seemed friendly, but there was just something that didn’t seem quite right: it was as if the encounters were a little bit too staged. Maybe they were. That takes us to the theme of this article.

It may not be well-known to many in Ufology today that most of the Space Brothers had a distinct communist-like way of life. And they pushed their views on those Contactees mentioned above. The fact that the Contactees brought in audiences in their thousands became a national security for the FBI – and no, I’m not exaggerating. You should see the sizes of some of the FBI files on the Contactees. The files for Adamski and Van Tassel were both in excess of 300 pages. So, with that said, is there any merit to the scenario that the Space Brothers were actually Russian agents – and doing their very best to promote communism in the United States? There just might be. Let’s have a look at the very strange links, in the 1950s, between Russia, the West Coast of the USA, and aliens looking just like us. We’ll begin with the most famous, and most controversial, Contactee of all: George Adamski. Along with Desmond Leslie, he wrote a big-selling book on his claimed contacts called Flying Saucers Have Landed.

Daniel Fry (left) along with other notable UFO contactee George Adamski

Here’s one of the statements Adamski made in several of his early lectures: “If you ask me they probably have a Communist form of government and our American government wouldn’t release that kind of thing, naturally. That is a thing of the future – more advanced.” J. Edgar Hoover quickly sat up. No wonder: Adamski’s words reached the ears of thousands of Americans. The FBI, in one of its documents on Adamski, said: “Adamski, during this conversation, made the prediction that Russia will dominate the world and we will then have an era of peace for 1,000 years. He stated that Russia already has the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb and that the great earthquake, which was reported behind the Iron Curtain recently, was actually a hydrogen bomb explosion being tried out by the Russians. Adamski states this ‘earthquake’ broke seismograph machines and he added that no normal earthquake can do that.” No wonder the FBI watched the man for years.

Now, there’s Truman Bethurum. His story is a strange one – a very strange one. His 1954 book, Aboard a Flying Saucer, remains a Contactee classic of its kind. In the 1950s, Bethurum claimed flirty, late-night close encounters with a beautiful alien space-babe named Aura Rhanes. “Tops in shapeliness and beauty” was the way Bethurum described “the captain” of the ship. The locations of all the action were almost always isolated areas of Nevada’s expansive Mormon Mountains. Most ufologists of the day, very understandably, dismissed Bethurum’s tales as fantasies run wild and free. Indeed, Aura came across like an ethereal fairy-queen from a centuries-old folktale. Now, let’s get to the Communism side of all this. It’s intriguing to note the following words from Bethurum: “Two or three fellows who had sons in Korea and who read a lot in the newspapers about the Communist underground in this country, were convinced in their own minds that I was, if making contact with anyone at all, making it with enemy agents. They even went so far as to tell me belligerently that they intended to get guns and follow me nights, and if they caught up me having intercourse with any people from planes, airships of any kind, they’d blast me and those people too.”

Was Aura Rhanes a figment of Bethurum’s imagination? Could she have been an alien? Might she have been one of those “enemy agents” to which Bethurum referred? A Russian plant seeking to manipulate the UFO scene? Taking into consideration all that we have learned so far, we should not dismiss the latter possibility out of hand. On a related matter, it’s worth noting that FBI’s records demonstrate that in December 1954, the Palm Springs Republican Club contacted the FBI to inquire if Bethurum might be guilty of “trying to put over any propaganda.” Now, it’s time to address the saga of Orfeo Angelucci, another of the famous Contactees. In April 1952, Angelucci secured a good job with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, California, specifically in the Plastics Unit. Maybe, there was someone – with the name of Ivan or Dmitri – who wanted to learn all about what was going on at Lockheed, and, using a UFO ruse, tried to get Angelucci to find the latest technological developments. There’s no doubt that Angelucci was approached by what sound just like Russian agents.

It was in this period, the early Fifties, that Angelucci caught the attention of the FBI – and for a very curious reason. As he became more adept at public speaking, and more comfortable about discussing his claimed encounters with aliens, Angelucci revealed something disturbingly eye-opening. It was something which soon had the Feds on his tail. According to Angelucci, as his profile as one of the Contactees grew and grew, he found himself approached on several occasions by what he described as a “subversive element.” This small group – “foreigners,” as he worded it – first approached Angelucci while he was engaged in a series of lectures along the east coast in the 1950s. Regular UFO enthusiasts, they were certainly not. Angelucci admitted to UFO researcher/writer Jim Moseley that he was “flattered” by the attention, but remained very uneasy about the agenda. Angelucci would later say of this curious affair: “Failing in their desperate attempts to convert me to communism and slant my talks along the Party Line, they invariably defiantly demanded: ‘Well, then, just what do you think is wrong with Communism?’'” Shortly before Angelucci publicly revealed that a certain “subversive element” was mixing and stirring politics with extraterrestrials, the FBI came knocking on the front-door of the Angelucci home. We don’t know what, exactly, went down, because in 2009 the FBI destroyed its file on Angelucci.

Could it be true that the Space Brothers (and the Space Sisters) from the stars were really from right here on Earth, but from the Soviet Union? And, were they doing their best to promote the Soviet life in the U.S. by using and manipulating the then-thriving UFO scene? After all, what’s more likely: agents or aliens? I say the latter looks far more plausible.

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One weird feature of the world of UFOs and aliens is that of the phenomenon of cattle mutilations. This is when cattle or other livestock are found dead and in very strange circumstances. The carcasses are usually cut up, drained of blood, missing soft-tissue organs or other extremities, dismembered, or otherwise mutilated in a variety of ways, always showing a surgical precision to the cuts not consistent with the attack of a predator such as a coyote or mountain lion. There are typically other oddities as well, such as a lack of flies or strange substances seeping from the wounds, which are sometimes even cauterized. Dead, butchered cattle will be reported miles away from where they disappeared or in inaccessible places. There is never any sign of tracks of any perpetrator around the body, no scuff marks or sign of a struggle, and sometimes there aren’t even tracks from the dead animal, as if it has just materialized there or been carefully placed from the air. Usually there is no blood at all, and a distinct lack of decomposition or damage from scavengers. Even insects are usually said to shun these mystery corpses. This is all usually found after the fact, with no explanation, but one case of cattle mutilation going back all the way to the 19^th features a witness who saw this happening, and which has remained a controversial case to this day.

One of the only known reports of someone actually witnessing a cow being abducted by aliens, and which would become a spooky case of cattle mutilation, supposedly happened all the way back in 1897, in the rural area of LeRoy, Kansas, in the United States. One evening in April of that year, a local cattle rancher by the name of Alexander Hamilton and his son were apparently woken up at around 10:30 PM by the sound of a “noise among the cattle.” It was at first thought that this was just their dog up to some prankish behavior with the cows outside, but when Hamilton went to the window to look outside, he was astonished by what he saw. He claimed that he witnessed a very strange-looking and enormous “airship” hovering above the cow lot around 600 feet away, with “strange beings” visible within it, and he would say of what happened:

Calling my tenant, Gid Heslip, and my son Wall, we seized some axes and ran to the corral. Meanwhile the ship had been gently descending until it was not more than thirty feet above the ground and we came within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brightly lighted within and everything was plainly visible-it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together but we could not understand a word they said. Every part of the vessel which was not transparent was of a dark reddish color. We stood mute with wonder and fright. Then some noise attracted their attention and they turned a light directly upon us. Immediately on catching sight of us they turned on some unknown power, and a great turbine wheel, about thirty feet in diameter, which was revolving slowly below the craft, began to buzz and the vessel rose lightly as a bird.

As the three of them looked on in absolute astonishment, the flying craft seemed to have taken an interest in the cattle below it. In particular, it seemed to float over to and hover above a heifer that it seemed especially drawn to. Then, a very bizarre sequence of events would play out. Hamilton would say:

When about three hundred feet above us it seemed to pause and to hover directly above a two-year-old heifer which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found some material fastened in a slip knot around her neck and going up to the vessel from the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest.

The following day, Hamilton went out to look for the cow, but could find no trace of it, not even any tracks. There were signs that the animal had been at that spot, but after that it seems to have just evaporated into thin air. The baffled rancher went around to other ranchers in the area, but no one had seen the missing animal. However, he would soon find someone who had made a rather gruesome find a few miles away, of which Hamilton would say:

Coming back in the evening I found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of LeRoy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking that someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep, I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don’t know whether they are devils or angels or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don’t want any more to do with them.

Rather eerily, it was reported that the remains had no footprints around them, no sign of predator activity, in fact no signs of any struggle, as if they had just been carefully placed there from above. The whole sensational account would be published in the Yates Center Farmers Advocate and once it was out in the wild become big local news. At the time, the region was in the throes of a series of mysterious sightings of strange airships, often described as highly advanced flying machines covered with electric lights and well ahead of anything available at the time, often seen manned by very strange looking humanoid occupants. Such mysterious airships had been sighted in such far-flung places as the Midwest, California, Texas, and Utah, so they were already making the rounds in the news at the time, but Hamilton’s report was especially amazing. When the odd news hit, there immediately came in a deluge of witnesses saying they had seen the same ship in the area where the cow abduction had occurred, and Hamilton even had over a dozen high-profile, well-respected citizens sign an affidavit vouching for his tale and his honesty, including several Sheriffs, pharmacists, attorneys, a banker, a doctor, the State Oil Inspector, the Justice of the Peace, the Postmaster, and the Register of Deeds. Considering that at the time Hamilton was a very respected, upstanding citizen, a stock dealer and successful businessman, most people believed his story and it generated a lot of excitement. One statement made of his impeccable character reads:

Hamilton’s popularity in the community is unmistakable not only on account of his fidelity to duty in public office, but also because of his honorable business career, his fidelity to manly principles and his reliability in private life. During the long years of his residence in Kansas he has left the impress of his individuality for good upon the communities with which he has been connected and he feels just pride in the splendid advancement made by his adopted state. We have never heard his word questioned and that we do verily believe his statement to be true and correct.

Despite how much it had been talked about, the Hamilton cow abduction story would eventually sort of fade away into obscurity until it was dug up again in the 1960s. Jacques Vallee would mention it in his book Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965), and after that it would feature in a best-selling book by ufologist Frank Edwards in his book Flying Saucers—Serious Business in 1966, which really brought it into the limelight, after which it would be mentioned in various other books and magazine articles over the years. For a long time it was considered to be a very intriguing early UFO account and perhaps the only time a cattle mutilation had been actually witnessed by someone, but a 1977 article in Fate Magazine would take some of the wind out of its sails. Author Jerome Clark would uncover the fact that Hamiton had allegedly at the time been a member of a local “Liar’s Club,” in which prominent citizens would make up wild yarns to see which ones would make it into the news and fool people the most. Clark cited as evidence a 1943 article from a Kansas newspaper called The Buffalo Enterprise, which held the testimony on a Mrs. Donna Steeby of Wichita Kansas, who related how her 93-year-old mother, Ethel L Shaw, had know Hamilton, and that he had told her that it was all a big, wild yarn that had gotten out of hand. Shaw would apparently tell Clark of it all:

How well I remember that beautiful afternoon, almost as though it were yesterday. I, as a young girl about fourteen years old, was visiting in the Hamilton home with Mrs. Hamilton and their daughter Nell when Mr. Hamilton came home from town, put up his team and came into the sitting room where we were visiting. He pulled up a chair and almost immediately began relating this story by saying, ‘Ma, I fixed up quite a story and told the boys in town and it will come out in the Advocate this weekend.’

Not only that, but she also claimed that all of the ones who had signed the affidavit had been members of the very same Liar’s Club, and that he had hoaxed the other airship sightings in the area by using fake airships that he had crafted out of cleaning bags, candles and balsa wood. Clark also mentions the discovery of a Robert Schadewald, an American correspondent of the British publication Fortean Times, who in 1976 uncovered an article in the Buffalo Enterprise of January of 1943 an account by a man named Ed F. Hudson, who claimed that he had been the editor of the Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate and that Hamilton had admitted to faking the sighting and even claimed to have seen the workshop where he had been making his fake UFOs. Hudson would say of this:

I had just bought and installed a little gasoline engine, the first I believe to come to Yates Center, using it to run my machinery replacing the hand-power on the old County Campbell press and kicking the job presses. I invited many of my friends into the back shop to see the engine work. Hamilton was one of them. He exclaimed, ‘Now they can fly,’ hence the airship story that we made up. After we had published it, the story was copied in many of the largest newspapers in the country, England, France, and Germany, some illustrating it with pen-drawn imaginings by their staff artists. There were also hundreds of inquiries from every part of the globe. Soon afterwards there came the various experiments in flight, but I have always maintained that Alex Hamilton was the real inventor of human flight.

This all seems to be pretty damning, and the story has gone on to be seen as a big historical hoax largely thanks to Clark’s article, but there are those willing to defend Hamilton’s story and have raised some points in their defense over the years. For one, Hamilton never really publicly admitted to it all being bogus, and was long dead by that time and was in no position to defend himself. There also is the fact that this is a second-hand tale from an elderly lady, so who is to say that she really knows what she is talking about or is telling the truth herself? As for Hudson, how do we know we can believe him either? There is actually no hard evidence that Hamilton was a part of a Liar’s Club, or that the others who had vouched for him were, just these admissions uncovered long after the fact. Although the main consensus now is that Hamilton was indeed lying, what if he wasn’t? One argument from a defender of his was written by The Last Sisyphus on Medium, who says:

The vast majority of “experts” hold that it was a hoax. A couple thoughts on the issue. One reason “experts” disagree with Hamilton’s testimony is that he belonged to “The Liars Club.” There is no doubt that this was probably the case, but to suggest that Hamilton’s UFO testimony is an elaborate hoax because he was involved in a liar’s club raises questions. The first: Since he was a member of “The Liars Club,” we could, in theory, dismiss every word Hamilton ever said based on his involvement with the group. But that is not fair. Hamilton probably told the truth on a number of occasions despite being a part of a liars club. Why is it not possible that he told the truth about the UFO? (He is, after all, backed by [literally] countless UFO reports.) The second: Hamilton did not give the “hoax” up (if it was, indeed, a hoax). We have no evidence that he admitted his story was a hoax. Also: There were others who witnessed this phenomenon. Hamilton even signed an affidavit (which is not something to joke about — no matter how elaborate the prank) and was practicing law in Leroy, Kansas. The hyper-skeptics have no basis to dismiss this testimony. Nothing. The most radical position for them to hold — while maintaining consistency in their own logic and scientific worldview (ie we are not at the pinnacle of scientific discovery)— is to remain indifferent to Hamilton’s testimony. The wisest response for a skeptic is thus: “We simply do not have enough information to dismiss Mr. Hamilton’s testimony, therefore we must keep silent on the matter.”

While the Alexander Hamilton case has long been written off as a hoax, some people believe Clark’s debunking of it all, some people don’t. We are left to wonder, is this all just a ruse conjured up by the “Liar’s Club” or something more? It is all most certainly a hoax, but some people still seem to defend it, and it has taken on a life of its own and has made its mark. Whatever the case may be, it is still one of the earliest cattle mutilation reports on record, and the only one that seems to have been allegedly witnessed by someone, back in the day when UFOs weren’t really a thing, so true or not it is an intriguing case nonetheless.

Evidence of serious, government concerns about the alien abduction phenomenon began in the 1950s. That was the year in which a young American soldier found himself caught up in a very strange saga that, to a degree, still disturbs him to this very day. It all went down on a chilly night in Utah’s expansive desert. Private Bernard Gerry Irwin was the man whose life took a turn of the decidedly unforeseen type. February 20, 1959 began as a regular day for Irwin, but, it most definitely didn’t end that way. At the time, Irwin was driving to Fort Bliss, Texas, from Idaho – the former being the facility at which Irwin was stationed, and the latter his home state. As night set in, something completely unforeseen and paradigm-shifting happened to Irwin. He was about to be confronted by the UFO phenomenon in spectacular and mysterious fashion.

The night was dark, silent and all but empty of vehicles. As desert highways so often are well after sunset. But, for Irwin this was a night he would never forget – which is somewhat ironic, as a result of the fact that certain portions of his memory were forever erased from his mind. As he drove along the winding, curving road, Irwin was suddenly distracted by a bright light in the night sky – but at a distinctly low level – which descended below a looming ridge. A meteorite? No. A flare, perhaps? Wrong again. Maybe an aircraft in trouble? That was Irwin’s first thought and, with that in mind, he brought his car to a stop at the side of the road, and turned on the blinkers. He quickly got out, and left a note for passing drivers. It read: Have gone to investigate what looks like a plane crash about one-quarter mile to my right. Notify state police immediately. Wearing his Army coat and armed with a flashlight, Irwin headed off into the unknown. Irwin headed for what he suspected – and feared – just might be the site of a plane crash, only to find himself in an even greater nightmare.

The next thing Irwin remembered was waking up in a hospital bed in Cedar City. Where and why, he didn’t know. A doctor and a nurse were standing around the bed, and were soon joined by a local county sheriff. Irwin was confused and scared, which is not surprising. The other three were far more interested in finding out what had gone on. Irwin kept muttering about “survivors,” asking the nurse and the doctor if there were any. Were they all killed? Who “they” might have been, it seems that no-one really knew. That included Irwin, whose mind was in complete turmoil. The doctor then broke the news: Irwin had been unconscious for a full day and night. It was only thanks to a passing warden with the Fish and Game Commission, who came across Irwin’s car, that Irwin was found. The police were soon on the scene, and Irwin was finally found, completely unresponsive, around a quarter of a mile from the road. It was in the early hours before Irwin was finally resting in an unfamiliar bed.

Irwin was kept under observation for several days, but remained unable to recall any of the events of that strange night. Military personnel soon appeared on the scene to fly Irwin back to Fort Bliss, where he was placed under additional observation by a medical team. After around a full week, Irwin was declared back to full health. But, try telling that to Irwin. Only a couple of days after he got the green-light to return to work, Irwin collapsed in a dead faint. He failed to remember the names and faces of the people who had taken care of him on his return to his base. Things got even weirder: in an almost hypnotic state he got a bus ticket to Utah and headed out to the scene of the incident which had caused so much puzzlement and concern. Not only that, in leaving his post, Irwin was officially AWOL – something which would come back to cause significant problems with his superior officers, which is hardly surprising. In somewhat of a daze, Irwin then walked back to Cedar City. While Irwin was certainly in big trouble with his commanding officers – he received a fine and a loss of rank – more intriguing was the response of the medical people who were required to continue to observe Irwin and try and figure out what had happened to him on that lonely, dark night.

Certainly, one of the most notable pieces of evidence that has surfaced via the Freedom of Information Act is a document prepared by a Captain Valentine, who was Irwin’s psychiatrist while he was undergoing treatment for his strange condition. On March 27, 1959, Irwin was injected with sodium amytal. It provoked a strange response from Irwin, which caught Captain Valentine’s deep attention. In his official report on this particular drug-induced session, the captain wrote: “[Irwin] stated there was a ‘special intelligence’ that he couldn’t explain to me, since it would be incomprehensible to me, which has directed him not to remember or not to tell me about any of the events in Utah. He says that if he tells what was behind the incidents in Utah there will be a ‘big investigation’ that he does not want to be bothered with and also because it will harm many people and he doesn’t want that to happen. He states ‘it’ all began at the age of three years,’ although he will not reveal how or what began, stating that it would provide a clue to me as to what is behind all this. Also, he informed me that he could leave this hospital any time if he wanted to by invoking a special force. Following this interview the patient stated he could remember nothing of what he said during it.”

Notably, David Booher – a UFO researcher who has carefully investigated the Irwin saga – says of Irwin’s statement made to Captain Valentine: “It’s intriguing that Gerry speaks of an intelligence which ‘directed him not to remember or not to tell me about any of the events in Utah.’ As we know, in the decades that followed this would become a very common theme in the alien abduction literature, i.e. having memories blocked and/or being warned against telling others about the experience.” The Freedom of Information Act has also shown that the military, despite dosing Irwin with drugs to try and uncover the true story of that night in the desert in 1959, drew nothing but blanks. But, the words of Captain Valentine strongly suggest he suspected that there was much more to the story than met the eye – and particularly so considering that Irwin had alluded to the fact that something happened to him “at the age of three.” It should be noted that alien abduction phenomena very often begins in early childhood. The case of Private First Class Bernard G. Irwin is a most important one.

There’s no doubt that the Roswell “UFO crash” of July 1947 is the most visible and talked about incident of its type. It’s a case that is noted for two important things that are relevant to today’s article. Number One: the U.S. government has changed its views time and time again on what happened outside of the city of Roswell all those years ago. Number Two: numerous civilians caught up in the maelstrom were “treated” to death-threats. The story was that a “Flying Disk” had come down. There was, however, a sudden retraction: it was all a big mistake. Nothing but a weather-balloon hit the ground on the Foster Ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico. Sorry! Screw-Up! That explanation stayed firmly in place until the early 1990s. That’s when the U.S. Air Force changed its story. Apparently, the weather-balloon was not a weather-balloon, after all. It was a huge “Mogul” balloon designed to monitor for detonations of early atomic weapons of the Soviet Union. The Air Force, also in the 1990s, made it clear that because Mogul balloons didn’t carry people, there couldn’t have been any bodies (alien or human) at the crash-site. Ready for another explanation? Yeah, there is one. In 1997, the Air Force said there were bodies (of a sort, at least), after all. They were, the Air Force said, crash-test dummies. That’s a hell of a lot of different explanations for one, solitary case. No wonder the Roswell affair causes more than a few people to go “Hmm.” Even the U.S. media went “Hmm” when the government’s crash-test dummies report was reeled out for one and all to see. Particularly so, because it was quickly shown by journalists that the dummy tests didn’t even begin until the early 1950s, never mind what was going on in 1947. I think that deserves a third “Hmm.”

At the Roswell Crash Site

(Nick Redfern)

Now, let’s take a look at another angle of the Roswell mystery: the threats that were made to people involved in the immediate wake of the event. It’s a fact there are literally dozens of people who, back in 1947 – when everything went crazy for a few days and nights – were told not to talk about what they had seen. As in: ever. Fucking ever. We’re talking about debris, strange foil-like materials, and even small bodies scattered around and clearly damaged to a degree. There are claims that people had their lives threatened. Stay silent or else. And, we all know what “or else” means, right? Reportedly, those threats didn’t end when the materials and the bodies were scooped up. Some people were threatened for years. Decades, actually. There are reports of people in the Roswell area having had their phones “tapped” for ages. Right up until the 1990s, when they passed away, some of the key, military figures in the story – such as Sheridan Cavitt and Lewis Rickett – were extremely careful about what they said to UFO researchers. And what they didn’t say. Cavitt, particularly, was very concerned about being tied to the the matter of those bodies, whatever they may have been. And, we’re talking about decades after the whole thing was all over. Yet, even in the nineties, Cavitt and Rickett were still almost shitting bricks when the Roswell affair – and particularly word of the bodies – popped up.  But, is it all over? That’s where we get to the crux of today’s article.

If the government had the whole Roswell story carefully wrapped up (in a secure “Hangar 18”-type scenario), and there was not a single bit of solid evidence hidden away by people in the area, there would have been no need, at all, for the death-threats. There would have been no need for endless phone surveillance. Why? Because the locals, the witnesses, and the rancher, W.W. “Mac” Brazel, would have had no evidence to make a case that something strange really happened. And the government would have been safe, knowing that everything was in a never-ending state of total lock-down. But, just maybe, the government isn’t safe. Not a bit. Consider this: both the government and the Air Force, of today, may not have a collective handle on what happened back in 1947. Maybe, more than a bit of debris still resides in the homes of the relatives of the original witnesses. And, sitting there until someone decides to come forward and hand it over to the media. Perhaps, there’s much more than a bit of debris hidden away in some of the old ranches of Lincoln County. Pieces of advanced technology, too, whether ours or “theirs.” Consider the following as a working scenario: that with all of the chaotic activity going on at the Foster Ranch (and its immediate surroundings) far more than what we know could have been quickly scooped up by local folk. Indeed, there is evidence that much was seen, touched and quickly stuffed in pockets before the military even had the chance to reach the ranch. Never mind close it down for a week or so.

Where “something” was found on the ranch 

(Nick Redfern)

There’s also the fascinating story of the late “Dee” Proctor. In later years, and when his mother was elderly and in extremely ill-health, Proctor – who had seen just about everything there was to see on the legendary day something strange came down – chose to drive her to a part of the ranch about two miles from the primary site. When they arrived, Dee told his mom they were now at another site on the ranch where what was termed “something else” was found by rancher Brazel and Proctor himself. The inference was that a body (or more than one body) was stumbled upon at that location. And it was found before the military had the chance to get there first. In light of that, who really knows what went on in that period of chaos? There’s also the matter of a significant number of files from the Roswell base – dating from the 1940s to the 1950s – that cannot be found. Anywhere. Even the Government Accountability Office admitted that when they went looking after the truth of Roswell, the files were nowhere in sight. Maybe, some element of the government still has those voluminous files – hidden away, somewhere. What if, though, an Edward Snowden-type character carefully, and secretly, was able to get his or her hands on all of those potentially crucial 1940s-1950s-era Roswell files? And, in the process, handed them over to someone who, one day, just might choose to come forward with the answers to the mystery? Possibly, that’s exactly what has happened. We’re just waiting – patiently or not – for that person to reveal themself. But, we, the media, the Air Force and the government, just don’t know it. But, the government prays it never happens.

What all of this just might mean is that – in a situation that most people haven’t thought of – the government totally failed to secure all of the material and evidence found at the crash-site. The result? Crucial data was circulating all around the place. And the military – racing around like headless chickens – were trying to get the whole thing wrapped up; but, in the process, failing miserably. In a strange situation, kids at the time in the area, like Dee Proctor, probably knew way more back then than any of us do now. Even more than a lot of the military guys ordered to cordon the place, and begin the threats, knew less than Dee ever did. Many people might consider the finding of whatever-it-was that came down on the Foster Ranch as something amazing. But, with huge amounts of missing files, and debris quickly picked up and hidden by the ranchers and locals who were way ahead of the military, you can easily see how and why – for the Air Force – Roswell might become the U.S. government’s biggest nightmare. I can easily see a scenario in which those in government, today, who are still tasked with keeping the truth about Roswell hidden, are terrified not by what is hidden by them, but by what just might be held in someone’s old attic. Possibly, something in an old, rusty container buried two-feet-down on the fringes of the old ranch and that, one day, might come to the surface. Or, something amazing under someone’s floorboards. Something that might come tumbling out in a way that the government will be completely unable to foresee, control or confiscate. And, solely, because of one reason: the government wasn’t right on top of things when it happened.

Since the dawn of time human beings have moved forward through resourcefulness, invention and technology. It is what brought us up from mere apes cowering in the dark, to the advance being we are today, travelling to the stars and unravelling the secrets of the universe. Discovery and innovation have driven us to be the most advanced species the world has ever known, and all of this comes from the discoveries and inventions of those who have managed to unfurl the layers from what we do not understand. But discovery and invention are hard. It takes a lot of work and trial and error, and so for as long as amazing discoveries have been around there have been those who have just tried to fake it. Here are some of the boldest, cunning, and most baffling technological hoaxes from the annals of history.

A very early hoax involved a type of robot before robots were ever even really a thing. In 1769, a Hungarian nobleman by the name of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built what he claimed to be a fully-functioning, chess playing robot, which at the time were typically referred to as “automatons.” It appeared as a large wooden box filled with gears, cogs, wires, and other fancy looking technological stuff, and atop this box sat a wooden mannequin dressed in Turkish clothes for some reason, and with maneuverable arms and hands. There was a large handle on the side, which Kempelen would dramatically wind up to activate the automaton, after which it would creepily spring to life to play chess. It had dexterous hands, could pick up and move chess pieces on its own, and not only that, it was touted as having the ability to “think,” planning strategies and studying and reacting to its opponent’s moves.

When Kempelen first unveiled his creation it caused a major stir, as no one had ever seen any automaton that could do anything other than merely mimic humans and animals at the most rudimentary level. By all appearances, this was an actual thinking robot able to interact with an opponent, which was mind-blowing at the time. Kempelen then toured all over the place giving demonstrations of his wondrous machine. A typical show would be for him to crank up the robot, which was affectionately nicknamed “The Turk,” and then invite someone from the audience to come up and try to play chess with it, and they almost always lost to it. He was always very willing to show that it was not an illusion, opening the side of the machine to allow spectators to see that there was not a man hidden inside, and no one could quite figure out how it all worked. Before long, these demonstrations were immensely popular, bringing in nobles, aristocrats, and even Benjamin Franklin, who lost a chess match to it. Everyone was held in awe.

Kempelen’s chess-playing robot

These demonstrations would go on until 1790, when Kempelen would have his creation taken apart and put into storage. Upon his death in 1805, it was sold by his family to a German by the name of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who put it back together and began touring it around America. As it began to gain more fame, speculation on how it worked began doing the rounds again, with many skeptics surmising that there had to somehow be a person, maybe even a dwarf, hidden within the box or even the wooden Turk itself. It would not be until 1837 that the secret would finally come out, when those involved with the scam came forward to tell how it was done. It would turn out that various chess masters had been hidden inside the box as many had suspected, and that a series of sliding panels, mirrors, and a rolling chair had been used to conceal them while audience members inspected the inside of the box. It was then just a matter of using magnetic pieces over the hidden player’s head to gage where the opponent had moved, and then use a system of levers to move his own pieces. In the end, it was quite a simple explanation for a device that had baffled and delighted audiences for the better part of a century, and it caused great disappointment. The Turk itself would be put back into storage, and its days were finally put to an end by a warehouse fire in 1854.

At the same time that Maelzel was touring the chess-playing robot, another inventor was widely promoting what he claimed to be an actual, fully functioning perpetual motion machine. The concept of what has become known as “perpetual motion” is simple at its core. It basically describes an object or body that remains in continuous motion forever without any external energy source. If a machine were to be built using some sort of perpetual motion technology, it would theoretically run forever without any need for fuel, batteries, or power of any kind. This means basically unlimited energy, freeing us from the tethers of finite sources of fuel and giving us devices that will never wind down or die out. It has become a sort of holy grail for certain individuals, who continue to plug away at this seemingly unobtainable dream, and it is just amazing how much the idea of perpetual motion has enthralled people over a large portion of history. One of these was first unveiled in 1812 by an until then rather unknown man named Charles Redheffer, who began exhibiting his invention in his home in Philadelphia, in the United States.

His fantastical machine featured a gravity-driven pendulum with a large horizontal gear on the bottom, and a smaller gear that interlocked with the larger one, with the large gear and the shaft able to rotate independently. On the gear were two ramps that held weights, and it all supposedly worked by these weights pushing the large gear away from the shaft, which would create friction that would cause the shaft and gear to spin. This spinning gear would then power the interlocked smaller gear, and on and on it would go, supposedly forever unless the weights were removed. The machine was put on display and immediately became a smash sensation, drawing in droves of amazed spectators and scientists alike, all of whom were charged a hefty admission fee by Redheffer and none of who could figure out how it all worked. It was largely whispered that he had finally cracked perpetual motion, that he had achieved the seemingly impossible dream. Before long Redhefer was getting quite rich off of his oddball machine, and there was much excited speculation that he had actually done it and achieved true perpetual motion, despite raised eyebrows from the scientific community.

Diagram of Redheffer’s machine

Redheffer, emboldened by the response to his device, actually requested funding from the state of Pennsylvania to build a much larger version, and on January 21, 1813, state inspectors were sent to take a look at the machine before any money would be paid. Unfortunately for Redheffer, he had never let anyone ever take a good, close look at his device, and it would soon become apparent why. The inspectors arrived and were immediately suspicious when it turned out they could only view it through a window into a locked room. Even so, there were cracks appearing in Redheffer’s claims when it was noticed that the gear cogs were worn down in such a way as to suggest that the weights, shaft, and large gear were not powering the smaller gear, as Redheffer claimed, but rather the other way around. To them this was an obvious hoax, but the way they dealt with it is rather amusing. Rather than call out Redheffer on his scam, inspector Nathan Sellers hired a local engineer by the name of Isaiah Lukens to build a replica that was more compact and set within a solid baseboard with a square piece of glass at the top. There was no discernible way as to why it could work, yet concealed within the machine was a wind able motor that was wound through the covert use of a wooden decorative finial. With a little sleight of hand, the illusion was nearly perfect, and when he saw it Redheffer himself was so incredibly surprised to see what he took to be a real perpetual motion machine that he allegedly secretly offered Lukens a large amount of money to know the secret. After this, the news did the rest of the work and Redheffer was undone and exposed through a taste of his own medicine.

Amazingly, this did not put a stop to Redheffer. Undeterred, he simply moved to New York to set up shop there where his reputation hadn’t been as tarnished, once again enjoying some amount a fame and drawing in droves of curiosity seekers. One of these was an engineer by the name of Robert Fulton, who noticed something fishy as he observed the mysterious device in action. He could see a slight wobble to it, and also noticed a very slight unevenness to its speed and the sounds it made, both things that should not be present in a real perpetual motion device. A real device of this type would need to be frictionless and perfectly silent because friction and sound would be a loss of energy, so these were glaring clues that something was off, especially to his trained eye. Realizing that it was obviously being somehow powered by crank motion, Fulton confronted Redheffer on the spot, but the inventor amazingly held his ground, insisting that the machine was real.

Fulton then challenged Redheffer to allow him to search for any possible source of outside power, to which Redheffer foolishly agreed. After this, Fulton simply tore out a section of wall in full view of a gathered audience to find a concealed cable that led to an upstairs room, where an old man was found operating a crank. The spectators, who had all paid good money to see the amazing “perpetual motion machine,” were less than thrilled. They reportedly immediately took out their frustrations on the machine itself, smashing it to pieces, and might have done the same to Redheffer if he hadn’t already hi-tailed it out of there to later skip town. Unbelievably, Redheffer would claim several years later that he had created another machine, and that it was totally, for sure real this time, and he even got a patent for it in 1920, but since it was never put on display or examined and the patent was lost in a fire who knows if there was any truth to it.

Such an invention would be groundbreaking, completely changing our world, and it is a fascinating thing to think about it, yet according to our current knowledge of physics it simply just isn’t possible, as such a machine would violate one or more of the laws of thermodynamics. To put it in simple terms, the First Law of Thermodynamics basically is about the conservation of energy, and says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another, making the idea of a machine constantly creating its own energy without any outside influence impossible. There is also the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which in simple terms more or less says that an isolated system will always move toward a state of disorder, for instance heat will always dissipate and energy will be lost on any number of variables, including moving parts, friction, even sound, with the more energy formed meaning the more energy wasted. It is all much more complicated than this very basic explanation, but the gist is, a perpetual motion machine is impossible according to our current understanding of the universe and the laws of the conversation of energy. Alas, all of the many supposed perpetual motion machines have proven to be hoaxes.

In 1875 we have the strange story of John Worrell Keely, who founded the Keely Motor Company. Keely made the rather bold claim that he had invented what he called a “vibratory generator” that could purportedly wrest enough power out of a quart of water to pull a fully loaded train. He would give some seemingly successful demonstrations of this amazing device, and soon had investors throwing money at him to develop it. He would keep taking their money and stalling as he fine tuned his device, but after more than a decade of this suspicions began to arise. Nevertheless, it was such a potentially ground breaking marvel that there was still hope it might all be real. Sadly, when Keeley died in 1898 it was discovered that he had been pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, with him having merely used a clever ruse of having a compressed air machine hidden away that would provide power to the engine. This would not be the last time someone would try to fool everyone into thinking they could turn power into fuel, and we will get to another case later.

John Worrell Keely

Not all bogus inventions were for benevolent purposes. In 1876 a self-proclaimed “Professor” by the name of James C. Wingard, of New Orleans, came forth with what he claimed to be a weapon that he had designed that could utterly destroy Naval vessels. It was supposedly essentially a death ray that he said projected a “nameless force,” and which could devastate any vessel “so as to leave no trace of them in their former shape” from a range of up to 5 miles. Wingard heavily promoted his device as the future of warfare, and promised that any one who had possession of it would rule the seas and be unstoppable, able to annihilate any enemy. This obviously had the attention of the military, and he went about arranging a demonstration on June 8, 1876 at Lake Pontchartrain. As a large crowd looked on, Wingard engaged his device, aiming it at a large wooden schooner. There was apparently a lag of around a minute before the schooner exploded into a rain of fire and smoke, after which the vessel rapidly sank.

It would soon be found that the schooner had been completely obliterated, with one statement saying “even the small timbers aft of the mainmast were broken all to pieces,” and the test seemed to have been a resounding success. Wingard then formed a stock company in Boston and continued his work on refining his groundbreaking weapon, attracting many investors. As with Keeley, they were soon demanding results, so he set up another demonstration in Boston Harbor. However, when he activated the device, there was an explosion far from the target vessel, and an investigation would find a disintegrated rowboat and two bodies in the water. Wingard cancelled the demonstration and that was all highly suspicious, with skeptics now suggesting that he was merely sending a crew out on a rowboat to secretly plant explosives on the target vessel and then using a triggering mechanism to ignite it. Wracked with guilt, Wingard would come clean and admit that this was the case, and that his team had died when the explosives had accidentally gone off. The death ray had been a sham all along.

Moving onto 1896 we have the bizarre story of Rev. Prescott Ford Jernegan, of Middletown, Connecticut, who claimed to have developed a way to extract gold from sea water with a device he called the “Gold Accumulator.” It was not a new idea at the time, but no one had ever even come close to accomplishing it. He first came to a jeweler named Arthur Ryan with this amazing invention, and offered to perform a demonstration. The machine itself looked like a simple wooden box with holes that water could pass through, with the inside containing mercury that would be electrically charged to activate a “secret ingredient.” The box was to be lowered into sea water, left overnight, and when it was pulled up the next day it would be filled with gold due to some mysterious chemical process. When Ryan agreed to see a demonstration, Jernegan simply gave him the box and told him he could do it on his own.

In February of 1897 Ryan went about testing the device on a wharf outside of Providence, Rhode Island, along with several colleagues. They used it as its inventor had instructed them to, lowered it into the water, and the next morning sure enough there were flecks of gold within it. It wasn’t as much as they had been expecting, but it was still over $100 dollars of gold in today’s money so it was seen as promising. If a collection of such machines could be set up running day and night, it could prove to be quite lucrative indeed. Jernagan said he could churn out a further 1,000 devices within the year, and there were dollar signs dancing through Ryan’s eyes. Jernegan, Ryan, and a team of investors founded the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, and got to work on getting stinky filthy rich.

They set up an array of accumulators in Maine and Boston, and began pulling in more gold from them, “proving” it worked and attracting people wanting to buy stock in the company. Investors were pouring in money, interest was high, and it seemed to be too good to be true, and sadly, it was. In July of 1898, Jernegan suddenly vanished without a trace, later found to have hi-tailed it to Europe under a fake name. Not long after they were gone, the accumulators stopped producing gold, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they had all been scammed. It would turn out that Jernegan had an assistant named Charles Fisher, who also happened to have been a trained diver. It turned out that he had been secretly diving into the sea to load the accumulators with gold, a small price to pay considering how much they were pulling in from investors. As soon as the orders for their machines had gone up, they had taken all of the invested money and made a run for it, making a cool $200,000 each, about a bajillion dollars in today’s money. The two scam artists were never caught, but the idea of extracting gold from sea water remained for quite some time.

In 1909, we have the clever hoax of an inventor named Wallace Tillinghast, from Worcester, Massachusetts, who claimed that he had built an amazing new type of airplane. This was only a few years after the Wright Brothers had made their first flight, and aircraft were still in their infancy, slow and only capable of short stints with little extra weight. Indeed, the longest flight up to then was Louis Blériot’s solo flight across the English Channel, which had gone only 22 miles. In comparison, Tillinghast claimed that his own design could hold three passengers and fly over 300 miles at an average speed of 120 miles an hour, which might as well have been magic at the time. He further claimed that he had performed several test flights of his aircraft that confirmed these numbers, and excitement was high.

Through all of this, Tillinghast was very secretive as to how his airplane worked, claiming that he did not want the plans to get into the wring hands, but he assured the public that he would come forward with his amazing invention. In the meantime, there were alleged sightings of the new airplane all over New England, with thousands of witnesses and many claiming that it often shot a searchlight below it. However, there were many skeptics. Wilbur Wright himself dismissed Tillinghast’s claims as “too palpably absurd from the first to take seriously,” and reporters who had been following him and even staking out his home could find no evidence that he had any such plane or workshop where he claimed to be working on it.

As this was going on there were still numerous sightings of a mysterious airship the like of which no one had ever seen, and Tillinghast insisted that he was telling the truth. Eventually, a local man named C.D. Rawson admitted to causing the sightings with lights and reflectors attached to owls as a hoax, but Tillinghast did not budge from his adamant position that his invention was real. 1910 came and went with no further word on the amazing new airplane, and the public ended up merely shrugging their shoulders and moving on. It would largely be looked at as a huge hoax, with no evidence that Tillinghast had any such aircraft or had ever made a flight at all, and he would just sort of fade away into the background.

Moving on into more modern times, we have still more mysterious supposed inventions that could have had world changing implications. In the 1970s, a man named Thomas Ogle claimed to have developed a new type of car carburetor that supposedly could make gasoline into a pressurized vapor and utilize it on the engine’s firing chambers in an incredibly super efficient manner, allowing vehicles to allegedly run over 100 miles to the gallon. In addition, Ogle claimed that any car could be modified to use the new system easily and for not much additional cost, making the whole thing seem almost too good to be true. Ogle himself showed off a Ford Galaxie that had supposedly been fitted with the new miracle carburetor and was clocked at around 113 miles to the gallon.

Unfortunately we will never know. Ogle died in 1981 without ever having divulged just how the vapor carburetor worked, and even his death has sparked controversy, with some saying he was intentionally poisoned by someone within the big gasoline companies who stood to lose the most from such an innovative product. Considering that no one has ever been able to replicate the process, it has been speculated that the whole thing could have been a hoax, with Ogle simply showing an illusion utilizing hidden fuel tanks, but other have defended his invention as having been real, and in the end the fact is we simply don’t know. All we know is that it would have been a revolutionary development way ahead of its time.

Thomas Ogle

Getting back to perpetual motion machines, one was unveiled in 1979 by American inventor Joseph Newman. The machine was called the DC motor, and according to him worked by using “energy in a magnetic field consisting of matter in motion,” and which he claimed could produce more energy than was put into it. He even went about seeking a patent for his invention, but it was denied as the Patent Office could not see how it could feasibly work. When Newman appealed this decision, it was found in an investigation by the National Bureau of Standards that the device’s power output was never above 100% of the power supplied to it, which was not promising. Newman would continue to adamantly insist that his machine really worked, but he sort of fell into obscurity after making all manner of other crackpot claims over the years. Whether his supposed perpetual motion machine ever really worked or not remains unknown, but everything we know about science says probably not. For now, the notion of a real working perpetual motion machine really does sit in the realm of science fiction, and it has mostly been a pursuit abandoned by most real scientists. It has come to be relegated to mad inventors working in their garages against all odds to try and make the impossible possible.

Our species is always going to reach towards the horizon and penetrate into the mysteries that we don’t understand, further opening up new discoveries and propelling our progress. This is an innate feature of our kind, and to be sure there will be leaps and bounds made over the coming decades that will bring true progress. Yet looking back at cases such as these it seems that for as much progress as we make, there will always be those willing to fake it for fame or money.

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